The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Forward error correction (FEC) is often used in communication systems. With FEC, a transmitter device encodes data that is to be transmitted, and the encoding introduces redundancy. At a receiver, a decoder utilizes the redundancy to correct errors in the received data, where the errors occurred as a result of transmission. As redundancy is increased, more errors can be corrected at the receiver. On the other hand, as redundancy increases, more transmission bandwidth is utilized for transmitting redundancy symbols and therefore less bandwidth is available for transmitting information symbols.
One example of an FEC code is Reed-Solomon, which is a type of block code. A block code encodes a block of information symbols by adding redundancy symbols to the original information symbols. With Reed-Solomon (RS), a block of information symbols and their associated redundancy symbols are often referred to as a codeword. A common RS codeword size is (255, 239), which indicates a codeword of size of 255 bytes, with 239 information bytes and 16 redundancy bytes.
One type of communication system that utilizes RS(255, 239) is the Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network (GPON), which operates according to the G.984.3 Standard, defined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).